The Portland Harbor is a toxic embarrassment. And there’s plenty of blame to go around.

In any good monster movie, the initial terror comes from
knowing there’s something awful out there—even though you don’t get a
good look at it.

It lurks in the
shadows or just beneath the water’s surface. When the monster finally
appears, what’s really scary is not whether someone is going to die, but
the gruesome way it’s going to happen.

For the past 12
years, some of the most powerful companies in Oregon have lived in fear
of an unspeakable beast at the bottom of the Willamette River, a toxic
freak that could figuratively eat them alive.

The monster has shown itself. It looks a lot like a carp.

IMAGE: James Rexroad

This fish and other
bottom feeders—bass, crappie and bullhead catfish—carry in their flesh
the poison from decades of pollution that coats the bottom of the river.
And how these fish threaten the health of Oregonians will determine the
end game in what has been a long and expensive battle over the city’s
industrial legacy.

The Willamette gives
Portland its sense of identity: a working waterfront city connected to
the wider world by what ships in and out of this river. The postcard
views of bridges and barges have helped define Portland as a city that
lives in harmony with its environment.

But
the river’s belly is also Portland’s great embarrassment. Its sediments
are stained with decades of toxic pollution, coating the river bottom
with chemicals, metals and tar so potent the U.S. government is
demanding it be cleaned up.

The fight over who
must pay to do it has raged since before 2000, when the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency declared 5.7 miles of the Willamette to
be a Superfund site. The EPA later expanded the designated area—and some
would say the stigma—to a total of nearly 11 miles, running from about
the Fremont Bridge downstream to almost where the river meets the
Columbia.

The companies
suspected of causing the pollution in Portland Harbor—this stretch of
the Willamette where industry hums—have spent more than $96 million
determining how polluted the sediments are and if they pose a threat to
public health.

Depending on what the EPA decides, the cleanup could run as high as $2.2 billion and take another 30 years.

The reckoning starts Friday, March 30.

That’s when 12
companies, plus the City of Portland and the Port of Portland, will
deliver to the EPA a study that offers a number of cleanup options.

In the coming months,
you’re going to hear a lot about this study. It’s going to be
confusing, controversial and even tedious—but the future of the
Willamette is at stake.

WW has sifted through the river muck to help you understand how this really works and why it matters.

We’ve
found there are already two competing narratives here: One calls for
scrubbing the Portland Harbor clean, and the other calls for a more
cost-effective solution, even if that means burying the poison under
more mud.

What happens now depends on those scary bottom fish—and exactly how far we’re willing to go to make the monster go away.

How dirty is the river?

The water’s not bad, actually.

DDT DOCKS: The former Arkema site dumped pesticides into the groundwater.

IMAGE: James Rexroad

The Oregon Department
of Environmental Quality says the river is safe to swim in, with one
exception: Rain can send sewage out through stormwater pipes into the
river, making the Willamette unsafe for a period of time. Portland’s
just-completed “Big Pipe” project is supposed to divert almost all
sewage away from the river.

But the river bottom is a different story.

The sediment at the
bottom of Portland Harbor is a buffet of nasty chemicals: arsenic,
mercury, metals, tar and even perchlorate, the main ingredient in rocket
fuel. Near the Burlington Northern railroad bridge, for example, two
abandoned pesticide plants once leaked deadly chemicals: one, DDT; the
other, an herbicide that was used to make Agent Orange.

Most of the worst
pollutants ended up in the river during the past 60 years, primarily
from shipbuilding, ship-breaking, manufacturing and other industrial
work along the Willamette’s banks.

The
most common poison in the riverbed is also the most dangerous: an
odorless, pale yellow liquid called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
They were widely used as coolants in the building of transformers and
electric motors until Congress banned their production in 1979.

It’s good all that crap is down where it won’t bother anyone, right?

PCB and other chemicals don’t stay put. Tiny creatures
that live in the mud (they’re called benthic organisms) eat the
chemicals. Then they’re eaten by fish. Migrating fish, such as salmon,
cruise through the harbor and don’t nibble too many of these tainted
invertebrates.

But
the fish that call the harbor home—carp, smallmouth bass, crappie and
bullhead—get fat on the toxic meals. The chemicals that stay in their
tissue get passed on to people.

A study three years
ago found that, in many scenarios, people eating fish from the harbor
face cancer risks as much as 100 times higher than the EPA’s guidelines.
By far the biggest risk comes from those PCBs that travel from mud to
fish to people.

A 2006 report from
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says that people at
risk from Portland Harbor fish are not just sportsmen but members of
immigrant and ethnic groups that traditionally fish for food:
African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Eastern Europeans and Native
Americans.

Vietnamese and Slavic
immigrants use carp to make soup and fish paste. Latino people
traditionally catch bass, or tilapia. So do African-Americans.

Almost all of the above in this story is widely agreed upon.

Here’s where it starts to get contentious: No one can say for sure who eats the fish and how much fish they eat.

I don’t eat these cancer fish. Why should I care?

That’s just the attitude that bugs the heck out of the Willamette riverkeeper.

Yes,
that is Travis Williams’ official title. The 41-year-old native of
Milwaukie is executive director of the environmental nonprofit
Willamette Riverkeeper, and he’s putting pressure on government and
businesses to clean up the harbor.

Williams argues the Willamette deserves a clean slate and a safe food chain for the wildlife that depends on it.

And anyone should be free to drop a line in the river without worry that there’s a carcinogenic time bomb wriggling on the hook.

“It’s about fish and
wildlife, from the osprey to the bald eagle,” Williams said. “And it’s
about the fisherman who is exercising a basic human right—to access a
river and its species in a fashion that does not jeopardize his health.
This is our one shot to get this right.”

Well, let’s get on with it! Why is it taking so long?

The Willamette is under the control of the federal program
known as Superfund, which suggests there’s actually a fund with a super
amount of cash in it.

Not
anymore. It used to be that the federal government taxed oil and
chemical companies to fill up the so-called Superfund, and then went
ahead and paid for cleanups upfront. Then the feds would hunt down and
sue anyone who contributed to the pollution to reimburse the government.

But the Superfund is
broke. Now, before a cleanup can begin, the EPA tries to get polluters
to agree who will pay for it, and how much actual cleaning up is needed.

In the case of
Portland Harbor, the EPA has identified more than 130 entities that may
be financially responsible for cleanup. They include the City of
Portland and the Port of Portland, but they’re mostly corporations that
did the polluting, or the companies that own the old sites.

Many companies are
small or no longer exist. About a dozen companies with the bucks to pay
for the cleanup hold sway in the Portland Harbor. They have yet to
decide how those costs will be divided.

“I don’t think you’ll
find anybody who thinks it hasn’t gone on too long and cost too much
money,” says Rick Applegate, who managed the Superfund project for the
city for a decade until he resigned last year. “The agreement breaks
down there.”

So these companies are trying to get away with not cleaning up the river?

Well, nobody’s rushing to volunteer. But
at the same time, a lot of companies have stepped up to work on the
problem—if only to make sure they have some control over the cleanup.

Eight corporations,
plus the port and the city, formed the Lower Willamette Group in 2001.
That group has spent at least $96 million studying the river.

And many say they intend to do right by the Willamette.

“We
voluntarily signed on,” says David Harvey, environmental director for
Gunderson, a barge- and railcar-maker with manufacturing sites along the
Willamette’s west banks that are suspected of having contributed to the
sediment pollution. “For this stretch of the river, this is the most
important thing that’s going to happen in the next 50 years.”

How they define that “thing”—and the story these companies tell—is aimed at keeping their exposure limited.

The Portland Harbor
is home to more than 34,000 full-time manufacturing and shipping jobs.
And some of these companies say an extensive cleanup threatens those
jobs.

A
2009 report paid for by three companies on the hook—Gunderson, Schnitzer
Steel and Vigor Industrial, which owns the Cascade General ship-repair
site at Swan Island—claims a decade-long cleanup could cost $2.2 billion
and 9,000 jobs.

So the study coming out Friday—that will be the plan?

Seven plans, actually.

In
7,800 pages, the Lower Willamette Group’s feasibility study will propose
a menu of options, ranging from doing little or nothing to dredging out
nearly every hot spot of pollutants and hauling the contaminated
sediment away.

The EPA will weigh those options and issue final recommendations. That could take another two years.

“It’s the toolbox for
the EPA,” says Barbara Smith, a spokeswoman for the group. The options,
she says, range “from doing nothing to very intensive dredging over
many, many, many, many years.”